1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates a data acquisition apparatus and a data acquisition method.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, as a form generation method, a form is generated by combining a template having a design of the form with data acquired from a data source such as a file and a database that store the data.
Meanwhile, when a document containing detailed information about transactions such as an invoice, a book, and a contract, or information indicating a specific person is printed or output to be displayed, masking processing is performed, in which, for example, a part or all of the information is expressed by the other characters, blacked out, or not displayed.
Techniques relating to the masking processing are discussed, for example, in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2002-170072, and Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2004-94542. Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2002-170072 discusses a technique for providing data from a data file to a field defined on a form file that is a template representing a layout design of a form and combining the field and data to generate the form. In the technique, a masking method of the data to be combined on each field is specified. According to the specified masking method, output of a character string of the data to the field is controlled. For example, when “_” is specified in the field, a character of the data corresponding to the position is skipped. When “K” is specified in the field, a character of the data corresponding to the specified position is output. When “KKKKKK” is specified in a field in the form file where “ABCDEFGHIJ” is input as data, the six characters from the top, that is, “ABCDEF” are output. When “KKK_KKK” is specified in the field, “DEFG” corresponding to the position “_” are skipped, and “ABCHIJ” are output.
In Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2004-94542, a extensible markup language (XML) document including XML tags is generated based on a document logical structure. In accordance with the XML document, masking processing is performed. More specifically, document items such as a document number, date, and a headline are tagged by XML tags on a masking-target document. In addition, a specific area in a text specified by a user is tagged by the XML tag corresponding to the information. Then, a nondisclosure level is set for each tag. When the document is output, the XML tag corresponding to the specified nondisclosure-level is detected, and the document in which a point tagged by the detected tag is masked is generated and output.
However, in the technique discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2002-170072, the masking processing needs to be specified to each field. Accordingly, if data to be masked appears in a plurality of points in the form, it is necessary to specify the masking method for each point. Further, if a new design template is used, even if the data is supplied from the same data file, it is necessary to specify the masking again to the new design template.
The technique discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2004-94542 is not designed to generate a form by inputting data into a design template representing a design of the form. However, the point to be masked is specified in the document logical structure. Accordingly, it is necessary to tag all points to be masked in the document by a specific XML tag. Thus, even if the information is the same, when the information appears in a plurality of points in the document logical structure, it is necessary to tag all of the points.